Solutions, not bluster and duplicity

Whenever President Duterte is reminded about the need for him to behave like a statesman, his hackneyed response is: “I ran for president, not for statesman!”—much to the amusement of his Cabinet men, hangers-on and the hoi polloi who couldn’t care less.

That former president Fidel V. Ramos has already distanced himself from Mr. Duterte’s insufferable vulgarity should be an eye-opener. Sure, Ramos, a West Pointer, has always been perceived as pro-American and that he probably resents the current Malacañang occupant’s making America his favorite whipping boy. But the President’s total lack of decorum and civility is by itself really disconcerting.

Take the Inquirer report titled “Duterte admits spanking bottoms of female cops” (News, 11/28/16).  He justified such blatant act of impropriety as just being playful. He needs to know that Republic Act No. 7877 (“An Act Declaring Sexual Harassment as Unlawful”) carries penalties of fine and/or imprisonment.  It is no child’s play.

In the Marcos burial case, he said he could not go against the law by preventing the late dictator’s interment among this country’s heroes. For a while there, one would think he has so much respect for the rule of law. But when relatives of victims of so-called extrajudicial killings cry “due process,” he tells them to “go to hell”!  This duplicity is most disturbing. Does Mr. Duterte have a “split-personality disorder”?

We shudder to think that for the next five years, our life as a nation is in the hands of a President who always makes us wonder what he means by the words that come out of his foul mouth. Even his communist friends are puzzled and cannot take his word at face value. Is he smart enough to play a game of one-upmanship or just too one-track minded to know where he’s going?

If truth be told, more than bluster from Mr. Duterte, we prefer to see immediate solutions to our traffic woes which seem to have become infinitely worse due to the sheer incompetence of people he has put in charge. His 100 days have long been up.  By any measurement, the waste of time and money when people get stuck in traffic has become intolerable.

Here are no-brainers:  Why can’t the President’s errand boys force bus operators to move their butts out of Edsa where they choke traffic all day long? How has it become the government’s problem that they have no other terminals to park their buses in? And more basically, why are they so helpless in disciplining thousands of jeepney drivers who have no respect for traffic rules and regulations? Do they really need “emergency powers” for that?

ULYSSES B. UY, [email protected]